Wednesday 22 January 1986

Went to party¹. Danced with M². Enjoyed it. Didn’t mind doing it anymore.

___________________________
1. This was someone’s birthday party up the road from where I lived.
2. M was my girl next door, although she too lived up the road. We didn’t have neighborhoods like one does in a suburb or a city. We had roads. You have to drive everywhere. I could go to M’s house on the bicycle, or walk for ten minutes. But yes, my first dance. On a weeknight. Perhaps it was a snow day … I seem to recall having school off around this point. I certainly don’t remember going to school the next day.

The hug and the shuffle steps to bad 80s music. The budding of sexuality, and yet, like the trees of February, the bud was still undeveloped. M would turn into my first major crush, although even by this point I’d liked her since Grade 2. She was a girl that even the boys who later turned out to be gay fantasized about. My understanding is that she is now in Vancouver and is described as being ‘high maintenance’.

Throughout my adolescence, when I had this affection for her, she’d tell me I was ugly and made me feel unlovable, which gave me self-esteem issues into my early 20s. Those issues, or this fucked up emotional development, has in many ways damaged my relations with girls ever since, although I’d like to think that certain girls have helped me get past some of this baggage.

Occasionally I still dream of M, and am very curious as to how she turned out, what she’s like now in her early 30s. These dreams tend to reveal that deep down there’s a desire both for her approval, but also a desire to feel vindicated, to say, look what I became, so fuck you for all that teenage bullshit. Of course, by her standards, I still haven’t become much, and yet, twenty years later it has just become a story, and who cares if I ever see her again?